A member of the radical domestic terrorist group that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst has died at the age of 81.
Bill Harris died of a heart attack at a San Francisco hospital on Sept. 10, his wife, Rebecca Young, told the New York Times on Tuesday.
Harris, who was born in Fort Sill, Okla., served in Vietnam as a Marine before enrolling at Indiana University after returning home.
There, he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, moved steadily to the left and met his first wife, Emily Schwartz, a fellow student from an affluent Chicago suburb who was also embracing far-left politics. They married in 1971, the outlet reported.
The couple later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they joined the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) — a violent far-left group that had gained notoriety in 1973 for assassinating Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster — and helped plan the Hearst kidnapping.
Harris, by then a top lieutenant in the SLA, was thrust into the national spotlight after he and two others broke into Hearst’s Berkeley, Calif., apartment on Feb. 4, 1974, and dragged her away in a violent struggle, stuffing her into the trunk of a Chevrolet Impala, according to the FBI.
Hearst, then a 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore, was the granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for “Citizen Kane.”
At first, the group branded Hearst a “prisoner of war” and made no ransom demand, but later called on her family to bankroll a sweeping food giveaway for the poor across California.
“Patricia Hearst was a symbolic target,” Harris later said of why the group chose her, according to the New York Times.
“Her family was in control of a media empire that we viewed as an arm of propaganda for the United States government.”
For weeks, Hearst was kept largely in a closet at an SLA safe house in Daly City, reading the group’s propaganda by flashlight.
In April 1974, the SLA released a photo of her clutching a gun, along with an audiotape in which she took the name “Tania” and denounced her family and the establishment, according to the FBI.
Less than two weeks later, the heiress went from kidnapping victim to bank robber — taking part in an SLA holdup of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco and turning her abduction into one of the most bizarre and sensational criminal sagas of the 1970s.
Hearst later said she had been coerced into joining the group and believed she would be killed if she refused — an account Harris disputed for decades.
The SLA’s downfall began May 16, 1974, when Harris and his wife were nearly caught stealing an ammunition belt from a sporting goods store, according to the FBI.
Their getaway van led police to a South Central Los Angeles safe house. The next day, officers surrounded it, sparking a fierce shootout that set the building ablaze and killed six SLA members, including leader Donald DeFreeze.
The SLA struck again in April 1975, robbing a Crocker National Bank branch in Carmichael, outside Sacramento.
During the holdup, Emily’s shotgun went off, killing Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was depositing church collections, according to the New York Times.
Hearst wasn’t inside the bank when Opsahl was killed. She later testified that she had been waiting in a getaway car.
After more than a year on the run, Hearst and the Harrises were arrested by FBI agents in San Francisco in September 1975.
Hearst was convicted of armed bank robbery in 1976. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979, and President Bill Clinton later pardoned her, the outlet reported.
Harris and Emily Harris served roughly eight years in prison for the kidnapping and were released in the early 1980s.
After his release, Harris divorced his first wife and built a new life as a private investigator.
In 1988, he married Young, a Bay Area defense lawyer, and the couple raised two sons in Oakland before settling in San Francisco, the New York Times reported.
It would be more than 25 years before Harris and his former wife were charged in Opsahl’s killing.
In 2002, Harris, Emily Harris and other former SLA members pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
At his 2003 sentencing, Harris apologized to Opsahl’s family for his role in her death. He was sentenced to seven years and served about four.
“If you do something and you succeed, then you’re a revolutionary of high quality and you get to be George Washington, the father of the country,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “But if you challenge power and you’re rubbed out, you’re in the trash bin of history.”
In a 2018 CNN interview, he said, “Reality isn’t always on the surface. Sometimes you have to look a little deeper to see what’s real.”
Harris is survived by Young and their sons, Cody and Shane.
The post Bill Harris, who helped kidnap newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in the 1970s, dead at 81 appeared first on New York Post.
